Accounting for the Landscape of Regeneration

Abstract

This article is concerned with members’ talk-in-interaction relating to place and, more specifically, how spatial membership categorization devices serve to delineate parts of the area being discussed thus establishing commonsense topographies. This area under consideration, and in which the interviews were conducted, is Cardiff Bay, a setting constructed within a large-scale program of urban regeneration. Complimenting the foundations established by Sacks and Schegloff, and contributing to recent concerns with the relationship between place and identity, the article pays attention to the way in which “place,” far from being a fixed “container” of action is implicated and mobilized in moral accounts relating to spatial organization, membership, and belonging. It is suggested that in paying attention to the use of spatial categorizations one gains access to members’ sense-making practices and, thus, how contemporary complex urban settings come to be organized in situated action.